Spotlight
Professor Charles Scruggs, “The Only Light We’ve Got in All This Darkness”
On Thursday, May 17 at 3:00 pm in Baker Hall, room 231, Dr. Charles Scruggs will present “The Only Light We’ve Got in All This Darkness”: James Baldwin’s Use of the Triptych in Going to Meet the Man.
Charles Scruggs is a distinguished Professor at the University of Arizona and scholar of African American literature, history, and culture. His also the co-author of Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History. Professor Scruggs will speak about James Baldwin’s short story collection Going to Meet the Man. The talk will focus on the two triptychs in the text, addressing how the stories were published separately and at different times. Reading the stories linearly suggests a progressive movement toward a positive conclusion, whereas if one reads the collection with the focus on “Sonny’s Blues” as the central panel (first triptych), the focus is on the suffering Christ or, in this case, the suffering artist (Sonny) whose music helps both himself and others to endure, and survive in, the earthly city. Professor Scruggs argues that one could read the collection in two ways—the triptych that highlights the central panel, the triptych that highlights the last panel—because Baldwin, living in Europe and knowing the art objects in Chartres and other cathedrals, knew the artistic tradition of the triptych and especially that of the Eisenheim Altarpiece.
This is event is free to the public and is sponsored by the Department of English in partnership with the Departments of African American Studies, History, as well as the Kennedy Lecture Committee.
The Department of English
Our department includes faculty distributed among four program areas: Literary Studies, Creative Writing, Composition and Rhetoric, and English Education. We offer doctoral degrees in literary studies, creative writing, and composition/rhetoric, and a master’s degree in English, serving approximately sixty graduate students in any given year. On the undergraduate level, we serve close to six hundred undergraduate majors, including almost two hundred integrated language arts majors enrolled in the College of Education.
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